Insurgents Are Mostly Iraqis, U.S. Military Says

Bush, Kerry and Allawi have cited foreign fighters as a major security
problem.

By Mark Mazzetti

Los Angeles Times

September 29, 2004

WASHINGTON — The insistence by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi
and many U.S. officials that foreign fighters are streaming into Iraq to battle
American troops runs counter to the U.S. military's own assessment that the
Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home-grown problem.

In a U.S.
visit last week, Allawi spoke of foreign insurgents "flooding" his country, and
both President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John F.
Kerry, have cited these fighters as a major security problem.

But
according to top U.S. military officers in Iraq, the threat posed by foreign
fighters is far less significant than American and Iraqi politicians portray.
Instead, commanders said, loyalists of Saddam Hussein's regime — who have
swelled their ranks in recent months as ordinary Iraqis bristle at the U.S.
military presence in Iraq — represent the far greater threat to the
country's fragile 3-month-old government.

Foreign militants such as
Jordanian-born Abu M usab Zarqawi are believed responsible for carrying out
videotaped beheadings, suicide car bombings and other high-profile attacks. But
U.S. military officials said Iraqi officials tended to exaggerate the number of
foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their
countrymen have taken up arms against U.S. troops and the American-backed
interim Iraqi government.

"They say these guys are flowing across
[the border] and fomenting all this violence. We don't think so," said
a senior military official in Baghdad. "What's the main threat? It's
internal."

In interviews during his U.S. visit last week, Allawi
spoke ominously of foreign jihadists "coming in the hundreds to Iraq." In one
interview, he estimated that foreign fighters constituted 30% of insurgent
forces.

Allawi's comments echoed a theme in Bush's recent campaign
speeches: that foreign fighters streaming into the country are proof that the
war in Iraq is inextricably linked to the global war on te rrorism.

Kerry has made a similar case, with a different emphasis. In remarks on the
stump last week, he said that the "terrorists pouring across the border" were
proof that the Bush administration had turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign
fighters hoping to kill Americans.

Yet top military officers challenge
all these statements. In a TV interview Sunday, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid,
head of the U.S. Central Command, estimated that the number of foreign fighters
in Iraq was below 1,000.

"While the foreign fighters in Iraq are
definitely a problem that have to be dealt with, I still think that the primary
problem that we're dealing with is former regime elements of the ex-Baath Party
that are fighting against the government and trying to do anything possible to
upend the election process," he said. Iraqi elections are scheduled for
January.

U.S. officials acknowledge that Iraq's porous border —
especially its boundary with Syria — allows arms and money to be smuggled
in with relative ease. But they say the traffic from Syria is largely Iraqi
Baathists who escaped after the U.S.-led invasion and couriers bringing in money
from former members of Hussein's government.

At the behest of the
interim government, U.S. forces last month cracked down on traffic along the
375-mile Syrian border. During Operation Phantom Linebacker, U.S. troops
picked up small numbers of foreign fighters attempting to cross into Iraq,
officials say.

Yet the bulk of the traffic they detected was the kind
that has existed for hundreds of years: smugglers and Syrian tribesmen with
close ties to sheiks on Iraq's side of the border.

Top military
officers said there was little evidence that the dynamics in Iraq were similar
to those in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when thousands of Arabs waged war
alongside Afghans to drive out the Soviet Union.

Instead, U.S. military
officials said the core of the insurgency in Iraq was — and always had
been — Hussein's fiercest loyalists, who melted into Iraq's urban
landscape when the war began in March 2003. During the succeeding months, they
say, the insurgents' ranks have been bolstered by Iraqis who grew disillusioned
with the U.S. failure to deliver basic services, jobs and reconstruction
projects.

It is this expanding group, they say, that has given the
insurgency its deadly power and which represents the biggest challenge to an
Iraqi government trying to establish legitimacy countrywide.

"People
try to turn this into the mujahedin, jihad war. It's not that," said one U.S.
intelligence official. "How many foreign fighters have been captured and
processed? Very few."